Some years ago, Gary Hawkins made a trip to Brazil to visit the Confederados, descendants of US Southerners who left the country after the Civil War and started new lives in Brazil. Here, from Garden & Gun, is his fascinating report. Excerpt:

I decide to rejoin the celebration, hoping maybe the cancan girls will do a curtain call. As it turns out, they’re finished for the day, but I’m able to pull one of them aside and pretend to be a journalist for a few minutes. Her name is Danielle (pronounced Dan-yelly) Sanchez Carr. At twenty years old she is already in her third year of law school at Pontificia Universidade Católica De Campinas. She is the daughter of Cicero Carr, president of the Fraternidade, and her mother, a non-descendência, is of Italian, French, and German lineage.

I break the ice by asking about her favorite music, and she lists eighties bossa nova, the Killers, and the Arctic Monkeys in that order. When I ask her about movies, she tells me that she finds the plotlines of the Brazilian films over-the-top and the performances forced, and generally laments the lack of a true indie film scene in Brazil. When I ask her about the Confederate flag, she tells me she was surprised when she discovered that it was linked to race.

Danielle speaks with enormous confidence, and at times I feel like she wants to shake me, to help me understand her words. When she can’t find a word, she invents one, à la Bjork.

“In law school we debate international problems,” she says, but “we can’t solutionate them.” She is proud of her history and the fact that it is “preservated.” “I am descended of all these places,” she continues, “and I intend to be buried there like my grandmother and my father.” This certainly doesn’t sound like any twenty-year-old I know. “It’s a place of reunion,” she explains, “a place where we identificate ourselves.”

Then she says something that clarifies the whole preservation effort, the existence of the Fraternidade, the engine that makes the whole thing go. It’s obvious, but it still helps to hear it. “I intend to keep doing my father’s job, possess his love for that, and continually live close to family.” I move a few words and restring her phrases until I grasp what she is trying to say, and when I do, I find it enormously touching. Danielle is telling me that because she loves her father, she loves what he loves, and this sentiment strikes me as so central to the Confederados experience that I don’t hear the rest of what she has to say. I don’t hear anything. I see instead an island outpost amid an ocean of sugarcane.